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Saturday, December 12, 2009

Here is video of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair defending the Allied invasion of Iraq to oust Saddam Hussein. Blair said even without the belief Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction, "I would still have thought it right to remove him."

Blair pointed to the fact that Saddam had thumbed his nose at United Nations resolutions for 12 years, and the knowledge he had used chemical weapons against his own people as reason to believe Saddam Hussein and his two sons would have been an ongoing threat to the world.

Blair is right. The fact no WMDs were found has overshadowed in the minds of many the real threat Saddam and his regime were to the world. The fact no Weapons of Mass Destruction were found after the invasion only serves to prove it does not appear he had them YET. It does not prove he was not, or would not have pursued them again, or provided funds and assistance to others who would have pursued them. The world is better of without Saddam and his regime, and the brave men and women of our Armed Forces and those of our allies should be commended for the job they did in disposing of the tyrants and giving the people of Iraq a chance at freedom.

9
comments:

Your view is more than a little skewed. You said "The fact no Weapons of Mass Destruction were found after the invasion only serves to prove it does not appear he had them YET. It does not prove he was not, or would not have pursued them again, or provided funds and assistance to others who would have pursued them."

Don't you think, before we go invading other countries, MAYBE the questions should be reversed? MAYBE we should have looked for reliable proof (which we did not have; sorry, the Cheney manufactured fraud doesn't qualify as reliable proof) to show that Saddam WAS doing any of that stuff?

If your answer is "No, we don't need proof, we just need to have an idea" then I ask you this: what stops us from taking that same approach to any other country in the world? Those Canadians look pretty scary to me - those slapshots can be wicked! And what about Luxembourg? How do we know those little rascals aren't brewing up an atomic surprise for us, someday?

As for Saddam's prior use of WMDs against his own people, you ARE aware, I take it, that it happened a decade before we invaded Iraq, right? That sorry excuse is about the same as us declaring war on Japan in 1951 because of Pearl Harbor.

You know very well that all major intelligence agencies believed Saddam had WMD. Bill Clinton and Al Gore believed he had WMD. Presidents cannot make decisions in 2003 based on what is known in 2009. Blair's point is that there was real justification for action against Saddam Hussein even without the presence of WMD.

Actually, I didn't even bother to listen to the Blair clip; it's meaningless. What would you expect him to say? "I conspired with the Bush administration to drag both of our countries into a needless invasion of Iraq"?

Face i: Dick Cheney cherry-picked the intelligence (some of which the Brits had already debunked) to misrepresent the threat posed by Saddam and Iraq.

I'm not suggesting that Bush should have made decisions in 2003 based on what we know in 2009. I'm suggesting that Bush should have made decisions in 2003 based on what he knew OR SHOULD HAVE KNOWN in 2003. Maybe he was as victimized by Cheney's fraud as Colin Powell was -- but it's still shameful.

"A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that the interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration.

"There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used," the former senior intelligence official said on condition of anonymity because of the issue's sensitivity.

"The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there."

...

"There was constant pressure on the intelligence agencies and the interrogators to do whatever it took to get that information out of the detainees, especially the few high-value ones we had, and when people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people to push harder," he continued.

"Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn't any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam, and that no such ties were likely because the two were fundamentally enemies, not allies." "

Yeah, I figured you'd make a wisess comment about a site called antiwar.com -- which is why I also went to McClatchy, too.

I linked to antiwar.com because it was a decent summary of information that I've read in a lot of different places, including writings by Richard Clarke, Colin Powell, George Tenet and respectable journalists like Bob Woodward. Feel free to dismiss it out of hand, rather than look at the particulars -- it's a lot easier to do it that way.

Or you can just assume, as million of America's rightwing drones do, that if it doesn't ever appear on Faux Noise, it must be a lie.

I mean, hell, Liz Cheney tells everybody on Faux, on a daily basis, what a great guy and a fine American her dad is!

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